A Farewell: Reflections on a Family History
by RoseUK
Summary: This is my farewell mainly to the character of Patrick Jane, told in the voice of a future daughter (which is essentially my own, I guess). I shed a little tear writing it, as [WARNING] there is character death involved. I'm interested in memories, so I find retrospection healing... (You may not!) I hope it brings some kind of bitter-sweet peace - it's grieving, basically.


**I'm a bit scared about opening this one up to public scrutiny, as I think that maybe some people will find it depressing! It's also one of my more personal, emotional pieces. But I wrote it with a full heart, in a kind of therapeutic mood. Ah well, here goes...! Disclaimer: I don't own anything to do with The Mentalist.  
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**Reflections on a Family History **

**A Farewell**

When I was a little girl, back in those hazy days of endless childhood summer, I would sit high atop my father's shoulders, my hands held loosely in his, and survey my kingdom by the lake. We lived in a modest wooden cabin that my father had rebuilt himself, close enough to the city for a healthy dose of reality, yet removed enough to create our own little world of magic and invention. With his curly golden hair and twinkling eyes, my father was a handsome, impish rogue straight out of one of the well-worn fairy tale books stacked untidily on my shelves; my mother a beauteous, raven-haired warrior princess who ruled our chaotic home with a firm hand and a kind heart. We were a team, an equilateral triangle, a small world of three: I, the only child, their heart, solidly in the middle, framed and sustained by these enchanting figures of benevolence and love.

I never realised, back then, the path that had brought them to our present reality; what child ever stops to think about what came before them? When your parents had a whole life and existence of their very own, stretching so far into the distance that you could never quite glimpse it, because they began when you did; they were born into your life as parents, and the rest did not exist. In my early life, my father was not a man with a story, a history; he was simply my friend and mentor and playmate, a father who stayed at home with me, utterly content to play hide-and-seek and build forts and dress up as Romans or mermaids or whatever the flavour of the week was. And my mother was not a woman with a trajectory of her own; she was the gentle presence that would kiss me fondly goodbye and tell me to keep an eye on "naughty" Daddy while she went to catch bad guys, often coming home to the chaotic aftermath of our games as we sat innocently munching sandwiches and waving at her as if nothing had happened. But she was never really angry with us. She understood something about us that made her lenient towards our mayhem. For a little while, I was pretty convinced she was a secret superhero. Awed, I would pester my father with questions about her double identity and the villains she battled and if she had a superpower, and he would listen patiently and answer in all seriousness. Mom was really "Special Agent Lisbon"; her superpower was "Justice" using the "Pistol of Truth"; and the baddies she defeated all had bizarre names like "Volker" and "Lazarus". And later, I realised that all of it was true (minus the embellishments, of course). That was the thing about my father: he had a depth to him, bottomless, an unknowable quality that kept him something of a mystery, but he never lied to me. He had learned something from my mother about truth and trust.

It was only later that I began to notice the subdued pain that would sometimes flicker behind his crinkling green-blue eyes – a faint ripple of a tragedy that had happened to him so long ago that I could barely connect its existence to his, still less to the photos of my half-sister that had been in our house ever since I could remember. On dark days, perhaps a painful memory stirred by an old news story regurgitated on the TV or reports of brutality in the paper, I could sense the tentacles of a menacing shadow straining to reach our sunlit clearing, its greedy feelers clawing just beyond the edge of vision. My father had a prodigious memory, elephantine. His blessing, but perhaps also his curse. When I was old enough, or mature enough, to comprehend, he told me the stories. PG versions, you understand. All interlinked, all pieces of the others. How he had lived in a carnival, where he learned tricks with coins and cards and people. About his first wife and his first daughter, Charlotte, who was like me, but not like me. Honey-blonde where I was berry-dark; quick-witted and roguish where I was bright and straightforward. About how they had died, a long, long time ago. And later, about how a wicked little man - long gone and never coming back - had taken them away, and broken him in the process. About how Mom and their friends had fixed him. But mostly about how I was safe and loved and protected. I often wondered what she was really like, this elusive half-sister of mine, though not with any envy, for my father loved me so wholly and deeply that there was never any reason. She had already been and gone in a way I couldn't quite grasp. There and not there. Gone and not gone. It was a thing that we two shared: my mother, quiet understanding in her clear eyes, knew this instinctively. No doubt he had confided in her in the past, and that she shared in his grief, but in essence Charlotte belonged to him, and to me. I will always think about her. Even now I visit her grave if ever I have the chance, and that of her mother Angela. She did not belong to me, Angela Ruskin Jane, but she was a part of my sister, a part of my father, a part of my parents' story. And so she is part of me too.

But oh, how my father loved my mother, and she him. From my earliest memories and ever afterwards, their love spilled over me like sunlight so that I never really understood where it was coming from: it was everywhere, diffuse and life-affirming, and all our friends basked in its reflected radiance. An invisible, inevitable force between them that drew me gently and everlastingly into its orbit. Even my notoriously inexpressive Uncle Cho would occasionally soften a little in our family presence, though you had to know him well to notice. My father's joy in me and my mother was infectious, and Uncle Cho - a man of few words and even fewer facial expressions - was one of a select band that had been there since the beginning. He knew strange things that I did not; he had been with my parents down murky, twisted paths that I was never to follow; and he had at all times been my parents' trusted friend and companion and guardian, both in light times and in dark. He knew what I meant to them, what I was born of and where I came from, and in consequence he became my friend and guardian too.

Sometimes, deep in the night, I would awaken in the darkness and creep across the creaking floorboards to find my father dozing on his couch, an old book or ten piled around him. A brown leather sofa, battered and well-loved, matching nothing else in our home, heavy with his scent and shape. It was a habit he couldn't quite break, a place of quietude and refuge, though his insomnia was never again the cruel tormenter my mother once described. During those quiet hours, when the human world was still and the lake and the trees whispered their hushed secrets, I would curl up, invited, into the crook of his reassuring arm, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath my ear, and travel to faraway places as he read me the stories he kept tucked under the couch exactly for moments like these. Stories peppered with his own inventions and imaginings, narrated in a voice that shifted like the waves as he put on a variety of characters and accents. He had a gift for the power of speech, my father; he wielded his voice and his words as a tool. Many a birthday party did he keep my little friends captivated with his storytelling and magic tricks - and of course my mother too, who was never too old for the sparkle of his showmanship, even though she sometimes liked to pretend otherwise. Sometimes we would fetch her to the couch to join us, and she and I would rest our heads one against each of his shoulders, feet tucked underneath us, just listening. And sometimes she and I would exchange a complicit glance that meant 'tickle attack', so that we all ended up a giggling, scrabbling tangle of arms and legs.

They both remained popular among my friends and classmates: my mother for her aura of authority and "cool job"; my father for his (as they saw it) eccentricity, wit and willingness to engage with them. But he steadfastly refused to suffer fools and felt no compunction in knocking bullies down a peg or two, usually with some kind of inoffensive crafty trick. Those who crossed him usually underestimated him because of how he dressed, how he spoke, how he always drank unpronounceable tea from a tea cup. Their downfall was failing to recognise the hardness that could rise fleetingly behind his levity, the sharp intelligence behind the joie de vivre. Mortifyingly, most of my teachers were quite won over by him: his disarming smile another weapon to be deployed at key moments (often accompanied by my mother faintly rolling her eyes). And between these two models of self-possession and unashamed individuality, the wild variety of teenage rebellion never entered my mind. They each gave me the freedom to be myself, and they each kept me on my toes. With one a cop and the other a not-so-former trickster with seemingly limitless powers of observation, there was really never any point lying to either one of them.

But all stories reach a final page, in one way or another. And eventually, as I must, I grew out of childhood, beyond adolescence, and moved away from our secluded cottage towards the noisy ordinariness of the city's coffee shops and traffic and crowds to start a journey of my own. As my father's golden hair frayed grey around the temples and a soft starlight silver filtered through my mother's ebony tresses, I left them to a happy, bickering retirement that involved fighting contentedly over an endless array of small things. It was one of his greatest delights, to tease her, my petite, tough mother with her gentle voice and truthful eyes, and she to feign irritation. To bat at him playfully, just to see the satisfied grin leap to his mouth and the light of mischief dance in his eyes. It was a game in which each player knew the rules inside out, and would keep playing until death did them part.

Sometimes, when I was growing up, and when I came back to visit, I would see them kiss. Always the same way at a special moment; always a tender expression of devotion. His right fingers and thumb gently propping up her chin; her left hand resting softly on his cheek, their crossed hands forming a neat little heart. It was how he said goodbye to her at home that day, leaning over her bed with such a look of love in his eyes, and in hers, that its power and force swept through us all, rooting itself in the nooks and tiny chinks of our hearts and minds and souls, never to be displaced. I finally comprehended the magnitude and strength of the golden thread that had held them together for all those long, short (so short!), precious years, and maybe even before that. How lucky they had been to find their way to one another, not least after a journey filled with such pain and despair and sorrow as in my dear, dear father's case.

I don't know what it must have cost him finally to let her go; this woman who had been his balm and light and sustenance, but he did, and then he came to me with unshed tears bright in his eyes and told me how alike we were and how proud he was to have us and what a cherished gift we were. "The way it should be," I heard him murmur, a catch in his voice. "The natural way of things." My mother had led him safely through a barren landscape of fear and pain and loneliness - the result of his first life being snatched away so brutally - and he had come to accept, as well as anyone can, death and loss with the equanimity of a humbled man restored to life by profound love and family.

I will never forget my smiling, clever, vibrant father, with his books and puzzles and quirks and untidy approach to life in the physical. His ability to pick a lock, to memorise Shakespeare, to count cards, to talk his way in or out of trouble depending on his mood. The cleverest, sharpest, boldest, tenderest person I ever knew. He was ever so, even in old age, and though it became perhaps a little more subdued after my mother passed away, he never lost his twinkle, reading stories and playing card tricks and coin tricks with my children, who loved him too, so very, _very_ dearly that it makes me ache to think of it. Even now, years later, they speak of him with awe and fondness, especially the youngest, who seems to have an aptitude for smart-mouthed, mischievous trickery, and there is only one man who gave him that: Grandpa Patrick, with all his wild and wonderful carnival tales, and eventful, colourful, vibrant, amazing life, even though I am old myself now and all this happened such a long time ago that it has become a story in and of itself – a fairy tale of redemption, like my childhood fictions, of love and characters who journeyed far and struggled hard and in the end defeated the monster and found a measure of peace. A moral that you can let the light in, if you choose; if you are honest and true of heart and brave, your world can blossom and bloom and be filled with light again. And that maybe what you needed was beside you all the time, unspoken.

**Note****: I used the 'story' metaphor throughout for a number of reasons - mainly because The Mentalist could so easily be transposed into a mythical world (imo!), and because I was writing mainly about childhood (a place for make-believe) - which I strongly associate with Jane in a number of ways. It was created with the father-daughter relationship in mind - not because I can't see Jane having a son (incidentally, I see Lisbon with a son), but because I was interested in how the dynamic might work with another girl after Charlotte. I know that Lisbon does not feature that much, but in my head Jane's daughter is quite the daddy's girl. ;) **

**I hope the characters are still recognisable. I worry that I paint them how I want to see them, not as they are... But if my own voice has crept into the voice of the daughter... forgive me! (Although you should know that my own dad/parents' relationship is nothing like this!). ;) There was probably so much more I could have said, but I didn't want this to turn into a monster (I haven't got much stamina). **

**I'm thinking possibly about a kind of epilogue as part of this 'final farewell', which may take a long time to get round to. **

**I chose to have Lisbon be 'the first to go', because in some ways I felt it was important for Jane to know he could cope with loss again. I know it might hurt/seem morbid to imagine beloved characters dead or dying, but I actually find it comforting to picture a full and rich life coming to a natural end, full of love, a love that transcends. To find acceptance. **


End file.
